New Large Rocky Planet Found

An anonymous reader writes "Discovery News is reporting the discovery of a super-sized rocky planet orbiting a red-dwarf. The star is located about 9000 ly from the sun. The planet consists of rock and ice and orbits at around the distance of asteroid belt. The planet could not grow to Jupiter size because the star is small and the system ran out of gas. The planet is about 13 earth masses and was discovered using the microlensing technique. Since most of the stars in the Milky Way are smaller than the sun, we should expect more of similar findings."

Comments

Re:Ok Where are the E.T.s

[Daniel Dvorkin]

AFAIK, none of the techniques we have right now can detect planets much smaller than the one they just found. The exciting thing is that every time the techniques get better, they immediately start finding bunches of new planets down to whatever the current limit is; which implies to me that once the resolution is fine enough, we'll probably be seeing ~Earth-mass planets all over the place.